Friends at the dancing Meeting for Worship. Photo: © Mike Pinches for Britain Yearly Meeting.
A dancing Meeting for Worship
Anthony Gimpel celebrates worship through movement
Several times during Yearly Meeting ministry exhorted Friends to be guided by the Spirit, to pay attention to the inward voice, and to ‘let go of my will and make space for Thy will’. All of it had a similar purpose, that when we are using words to describe an inner experience the temptation is to let our heads determine what those words might be. And we know full well it should not be like that, but it is.
For the session on dance some two-dozen Friends met in the restaurant, which had been miraculously cleared of tables, leaving a circle of chairs in an otherwise open space. I love dancing but had no idea what we were going to do. I mean, how do you explore whether we should rewrite our Book of Discipline through dancing?
We were invited to gather in a Meeting for Worship – by improvised dance! For me, this was like an invitation to heaven, though I know for others it was a challenge. We were invited to offer our ministry, without words, through movement of our bodies, to the Meeting; both as individuals and as Friends relating to each other. Well, of course, that’s silly. How else do you participate in Meeting for Worship without relating to each other? Surely what we do in Meeting is to relate, to help each other to come together in the empty space at the centre, and to bring each into communion with the Divine. There are no observers, only participants.
Among the two dozen, Ann Bettys was present as a facilitator, whose very gentle touch was to offer us no more than a starting point, and who otherwise was one of the dancing participants. Beside her, Robin Bowles offering musical accompaniment.
It was the most beautiful Meeting of Worship I have ever experienced. My body experienced an astonishing range of feeling and emotion: ecstatic joy, tears of weeping grief, agony of pain, loneliness, acceptance of the bread of communion. All of it was through the Spirit moving my body, in movement and in stillness, and all of it without words. My mind was engaged – not as an initiator but as someone engaging in understanding what was happening. And when my mind was trying to initiate, it plainly didn’t work. I freely admit that I had to quickly discard the resulting attempt to control and ‘let Thy will prevail’.
The music formed part of the wordless dialogue, sometimes informing us how to move, sometimes being informed by the dancers – all of it without words until towards the end, when everyone was seated cross-legged in a tight formation facing inwards. The music had fallen silent and we began to sing ‘Alleluia’.
I am told that Arrangements Committee had encouraged such a session precisely to explore how Meeting for Worship might be if we all let go of our heads and allow the Spirit in. And now I know by experiment just how wonderful that is.
